Whatever it is, it should be something that even people who have seen it several times would want to watch again. If you spend time and money making something, don't make it so it's only good for one viewing. Or, depending on what you want to do, you could design ‘reusable’ elements and then put out versions with slight (but significant) changes- things that would change the meaning or tone?

If you meant more along the lines of ‘how do I go about hiring someone’ then I have no idea…

Dammit. If it was still on my computer, I would put it else where. It looks like some sort cheep movie advert. (But like I said it is a piece of crap made a long time ago)

Um…let me see If I can discribe it. It sort of has a narrative with pictures appearing around it (I didn't know how to animate then). At the very end, the pictures flash in a quick succession and then the title of the RP flashes up.

sprites are a different story to producing your own animated character sheets, it's like a world apart, you only really get quality with experience and so on and so forth. best off asking somebody who has some real experience with animating this sorta stuff, which will probably mean looking off site somewhere.

From someone who has had training in animation, I am going to say, if you want something of decent quality, it's gonna cost ya an arm and a leg if you're doing traditional animation (like in anime). Flash animations would probably be cheaper, but keep in mind that Flash animations have a certain “look” to them, and people can easily pick out if it's made in Flash or not. It entirely depends on your budget and what kind of look you're going for. Are you going for a Flash cartoon scenario or a fully traditional animated cartoon.

Keep in mind, too, it's not just animation you'd be paying for. They gotta color each frame if it's traditional and make all the backgrounds, let alone just the pencil tests. Something that's 30 seconds long could take months to make. I've made a 30 second one in a month, but that's because I abused looping and there was very little action going on.

Long story short, animation in traditional means (hell, even Flash means) is gonna cost you more than you probably think. I've heard of trained animators still in school that get paid $50 an hour for animating.

Photoshop has a great animation component.If you have a basic knowledge of animation techniques you should be able to learn it rather quickly. (the principles are basically the same.)I used it to made this animation last year: